Friday dinner

Friday Dinner is a dance performance interlacing the aesthetics of both trained technical movements often taught in institutions, and gestural movements true and natural to a dancer's body. As a dancer trained in several codified forms, I am interested in the expressive range of patterns we absorb from formal practice, and the gestures and movement we manifest in our everyday lives. Using videotaped footage of dancers enjoying dinner, exchanging casual conversations and sharing childhood memories, we extracted natural gestural movement from the dancer's bodies. These idiosyncratic gestures were then layered with refined, established dance movement often found in dance institutions and academia. Heavily relying on recorded dinner settings and interviews, the work unravels a complexity of movement and virtuosity of presence, highlighting the aesthetics of both approaches while offering potential hybrids between these forms for contemporary performance.